First Round

This year, we aimed to refresh — and enhance — our in-depth snapshot of founders and startups across the entire tech ecosystem. We asked several of the same questions to track shifting sentiment and trends across years, but also delved into new areas such as how founders pick their lead investor and the perspectives they have on diversity and inclusion.

“Analytics is something that’s easy to put off. When you’re actively building a company and trying to figure out your value proposition, collecting and splicing data can seem non-critical or premature. But then, all of a sudden, you hit a point where things get complex, you need to understand your customers much better, and you have lots of unusable data because you captured it the wrong way – or didn’t capture it at all.” [Source: First Round]

You’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. And you may have read about how the internal-communication platform — now just two years old — is already used by more than 30,000 teams and valued at over $1 billion. [Source: FirstRound.com]